Another major revelation came out this week about the sheer extent of the surveillance state, when The Washington Post reported that the National Security Agency infiltrated a link between Google and Yahoo's data centers to create a back door to collect data from millions of users, without the companies' knowledge. Google and Yahoo both expressed their outrage and by Friday, Senate intelligence committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein came out against the NSA's surveillance of U.S. allies, and Secretary of State John Kerry admitted that perhaps the government had sometimes "reached too far." In Europe, Spain reacted to news that the NSA collected data on 60 million phone calls, in addition to the news about snooping on France and dozens of world leaders. Security expert Bruce Schneier wrote in The Atlantic that this represents the ongoing struggle over control of the Internet.

In tech industry news, Twitter's marching toward its stock market debut, and this week, it made a significant change in its display of users' tweets, showing pictures and Vine's short videos in user timelines by default, without a click. This will make visual ads on Twitter much more prominent, as The New York Timesnoted, which will help the company serve more mobile ads.

Water can keep servers cool. The project could be a floating data center, something Google was granted a patent for in 2009 but never built. But CBS San Francisco reported the barge will be used as an exclusive showroom to market Google Glass and other gadgets.